Please treat them as absolutely confidential.”
“I will. Thanks.”
Rush glanced back toward his wife. As if with one thought, the two men moved to the head of the bed.
“I think I’ll have a session with her myself,” Logan said. “Tomorrow, if that’s okay with you.”
“The sooner the better,” Rush replied.
36
The communications room was deep within Red, down the hall from the power substation where Perlmutter had received his near-fatal shock just days before. It was a relatively small space, crowded with arcane electronic equipment whose purpose Logan couldn’t even begin to guess at.
Jerry Fontaine, the communications chief, was a heavyset man in faded khakis and a pink short-sleeved shirt. The white cotton handkerchief in his right hand was never permitted to rest: either it was nervously being squeezed in Fontaine’s bearlike paw, or it was being wiped across his forehead, onto which beads of sweat kept reappearing.
“How’s Perlmutter?” Logan asked as he opened a notebook and took a seat in the room’s only unoccupied chair.
“The doctor says he can come back to work tomorrow,” Fontaine replied. “Thank God.”
Logan pulled a folder from his duffel and opened it. “Tell me about these phenomena you’ve observed.”
More dabbing of the handkerchief. “It’s happened twice now. Always late at night. I hear equipment coming to life, beeping and blinking, when everything should be turned off. The comm room is a daytime operation only, see.”
“Why is that?” Logan asked.
“Because there’s just me and Perlmutter manning it. And we operate it almost like a telegraph office-Stone’s orders. Any requests for Internet searches, for calls back to the main office, have to go through us. No night operation except in emergencies.”
Stone and his habitual secrecy, Logan thought. “Which machines are, ah, waking up, exactly?”
“One of the sat phones.”
“One of the sat phones? You mean, there’s more than one?”
Fontaine nodded. “We’ve got two. An NNR GlobalEye, for the geosynchronous satellite, and then the LEO.”
“LEO?”
“Low earth orbit satellite. Terrastar. Good for the high-bandwidth stuff.”
Logan scribbled in his notebook. “Which one was it you heard?”
“The one linked to the LEO.”
Logan gazed around at the incomprehensible, knob-encrusted facades of equipment. “Can you show it to me?”
Fontaine pointed to a rack-mounted device at his side. It was of brushed gray metal, with an embedded keypad and an attached headset. Logan reached into his duffel, pulled out the air-ion counter, held it before the sat phone, then examined the readout.
“What are you doing?” Fontaine said.
“Checking something.” The reading was normal; Logan put the counter away.
He glanced back at Fontaine. “Give me the details, please.”
Another swipe of the handkerchief. “The first time was-let me see-almost two weeks ago. I’d forgotten something in the communications room and I came back here to get it just before going to bed. There
was a beeping, then a bunch of electronic noise from the LEO.”
“What time was this?”
“One thirty in the morning.”
Logan made a notation. “Go on.”
“The second time was the night before last. With Perlmutter in Medical, I had to do everything myself. There was a backlog of jobs, so I came here after dinner to finish up. It took me longer than I expected. I was just doing the final log entries when there was that beeping again, and the LEO woke up. Scared the dickens out of me, I can tell you.”
“And what time was this?”
Fontaine thought a moment. “One thirty. Like the first time.”
Awfully punctual for a mechanical gremlin, Logan thought. “How does the phone work, exactly?”
“Pretty straightforward. You establish the satellite link, check the upstream and downstream numbers. From there, it depends on what you’re transmitting. You know, analogue or digital, voice, URL page, e-mail, and so forth.”
“And I assume, from what you’re telling me, the phone has no built-in timer-it can’t wake itself to send or receive a message.”
Fontaine nodded.
“Do you maintain a log of all sat phone use?”
“Sure do. Dr. Stone insists on logs of everything-who made the request, where the transmission was sent, what was included.” He patted a row of thick black binders that resided on a shelf behind him.
“Does the phone maintain an internal log as well?”
“Yes. In flash RAM. You have to manually erase it from the front panel.”
“When was the log last erased?”
“It hasn’t been. Not since the site’s been live. To do so requires a password.” Fontaine frowned. “You don’t think…” His voice trailed off.
“I think,” Logan said quietly, “that we should take a look at that internal log. Right now.”
37
When Logan was called to a meeting in Conference Room A to review the previous day’s initial penetration of the tomb, he assumed the group would be as large as the first conference he’d attended, when they’d assembled to discuss the generator accident. Instead, he found the big room to be relatively empty. There were Fenwick March with one of his assistants, Tina Romero, Ethan Rush, Valentino, one or two others he didn’t recognize.
Looking around at the small group, Logan decided that perhaps he could bring up his discovery, after all.
Stone entered, his personal secretary following in his wake. Closing the door, he walked past the two circles of chairs to the front of the room and took up position before the whiteboard.
“Let’s begin,” he said briskly. “Please keep your reports brief and to the point. Fenwick, I’ll start with you.”
The archaeologist shuffled some papers, cleared his throat. “We’ve already begun to put together an inventory, based on the video analysis of chamber one. Our epigrapher has begun recording the inscriptions. And once Dr. Rush has given the okay, we’ll send the surveyor down to begin making a detailed survey of the room’s dimensions and contents.”
Stone nodded.
“Our art historian has been analyzing the paintings. Her opinion-based for now only on the video evidence, of course-is that they are among the oldest known of Egyptian tomb paintings, almost as old as those at Painted Tomb One Hundred at Hierakonpolis.”
“Very good,” said Stone.
“While on visual inspection the artifacts appear to be in excellent shape, considering their age, there were several that could clearly benefit from careful stabilization and restoration. The black-topped jars and some of the beaded amulets, for example. When can we begin the process of tagging and removal?”
